Slamdance 2024 – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

CHAPERONE (Slamdance 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

January 22, 2024January 22, 2024 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas AANHPI, Chaperone, Laird Akeo, Mitzi Akaha, Slamdance 2024, Zoë Eisenberg

At 29 going on 16, Misha Moyamoto (Mitzi Akaha) refuses to grow up. She’s turned down a promotion at the small indie theater where she works because she doesn’t want more responsibility, and the house that she inherited from her grandmother is literally falling apart around her. The more pressure she feels that her well-meaning but increasingly fed up friends and family are putting on her to act her age, the harder Misha resists. A chance encounter with charismatic 18-year-old high school jock Jake (Laird Akeo) presents her with an unexpected chance to live the kind of carefree, laid back life she strives to, but the fledgling romance and her decision to keep her real age a secret from her new lover bring with it a range of thorny ethical questions that become increasingly harder for her to ignore. Chaperone is not an easy watch and it does not shy away from the often uncomfortable ethical terrain its storyline demands it explore, but it is also thoughtful and humane

Festivals Reviews

LOVE AND WORK (Slamdance 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

January 22, 2024January 22, 2024 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Love and Work, Pete Ohs, Slamdance 2024, Stephanie Hunt, Will Madden

The scenario is simple enough. A woman enters a near-empty warehouse space, and tells a man behind a desk that she wants work. A brief yet uncomfortable interview of sorts follows, and she is welcomed to the team. Moving to a table where another man and woman fiddle with parts of abandoned shoes, both the new employee and we the audience discover what the new job entails: they are seemingly making new shoes out of remnants of the old. But quickly it becomes apparent that what the job is has less significance than the fact they are working at all. Breaking into a song about how happy they are to have a job, we soon realize the reason for their delight.

Festivals Reviews

DARLA IN SPACE (Slamdance 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

January 22, 2024January 26, 2024 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Alex E. Harris, Darla in Space, Slamdance 2024, Susie Moon and Eric Laplante

Darla has problems. While her small business making custom made feline funerary caskets is growing nicely, thanks to her overbearing mother’s shady business skills Darla is looking down the barrel of an enormous tax bill that her day job mopping floors just won’t cover. But fortune rears its head in the unexpected shape of a sentient kombucha scoby – “Mother” – that has the ability to grant humans who come into intimate contact with it life-changing orgasms.

Festivals Reviews

THE ACCIDENT (Slamdance 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

January 22, 2024January 22, 2024 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Giulia Mazzarino, Giulia Scintu, Giuseppe Garau, Hekla Magnúsdóttir, Slamdance 2024, The Accident

The Accident bleeds out from its dramatic core into something at times verging on the darkly comic, and Giulia Mazzarino’s performance as the central character provides a strong, confident foundation for the various twists and turns to be believable and authentically rendered. While never exactly ham-fisted with its thematics, it is simultaneously also hard to miss just how keenly The Accident is focused on its driving critique of capitalism itself, painting it as a broad, ethically destitute moral force from which few in the modern world can escape. Despite its seemingly small-scale surfaces, The Accident is a film that pulls few punches, and is all the stronger for it.